Villeneuve stoked for sci-fi
FILM: Quebec director will helm Blade Runner sequel
Denis Villeneuve is at the Toronto International Film Festival with his new film, Sicario, but he is already dreaming about the future — literally.
The Quebec director’s next project is a sequel to Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s classic 1982 science-fiction story of humans and android “replicants” in a far future Los Angeles. (That’s if you can still think of 2019 as the far future.) Harrison Ford has signed on to reprise the role of Rick Deckard.
“It’s in the development process,” Villeneuve says of the status of the new film, which does not yet have a title or release date.
He calls this “the most beautiful part of it, which is the dream part, where you don’t necessarily commit to anything but you are just dreaming, creating a world. And that is where we are. We will shoot next summer.”
In addition to Sicario, which premiered at Cannes and opens in Toronto on Sept. 25, with a wider release on Oct. 2, Villeneuve has been at work on Story of Your Life. The science-fiction film is based on a novella by Ted Chiang and stars Amy Adams as a linguist who must decipher the language and intentions of a visiting alien race.
“I just finished the shoot ... this summer,” he says, “so I was not allowed to dream about (the Blade Runner sequel); now I am allowed to dream about it.”
The director is a fan of the genre; asked to name his favourite films, he quickly rattles off Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
In a separate interview in May, he described how he moved into this world after such dark dramas as 2009’s Polytechnique and 2010’s Incendies. “People were asking me, what do you want to do? I said science fiction, always science fiction. I’m dreaming to do science fiction since a very long time. So now that the door is open, I’m just jumping into it. My soul will be filled if I do that.”